8 ms·

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with col

Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it, and having lots and lots of business documents and video files to share with collaborators, I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Being able to set local and not-local flags on files/folders is great. I spent some time trying to use a few of their alternatives, plus their mobile client apps, and it's kinda just Dropbox still.

1970-01-01 5mo ago
You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.
- dghlsakjg 5mo ago
  Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.
  - dawnerd 5mo ago
    Yeah their memory of how much memory costs is outdated. I was just at a walmart this weekend and a 128 card was 30 bucks.
  - matsemann 5mo ago
    At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.
    - irishcoffee 5mo ago
      Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.
- browningstreet 5mo ago
  I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.
  - lostlogin 5mo ago
    Ah yes, the famously reliable Time Machine.
    - tibbydudeza 5mo ago
      TM was a hack - iCloud is pretty good I reckon - for the millions of devices they have in the market there has been the only odd complaint from somebody on twitter making headlines with a Technorati type of following about user accounts mysterious being deleted or blocked (poor customer support) or some weird syncing issues when moving to a new device and the old device is still in use.
- ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
  Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.
  - 1970-01-01 5mo ago
    How is a local copy not the best way to store data?
    - Twirrim 5mo ago
      A local copy is inherently fragile. It's easily destroyed by accident, flood, fire etc. This is especially true when using a single storage device like an SD Card, vs the way that these storage services operate, leveraging things like erasure encoding. Local backups are important, they're cheap, and often fast. They just shouldn't be the only kind of backup you do for data that is important to you.
      - asdff 5mo ago
        Make two local backups and store the other one at work or a friends house.
        beoberha 5mo ago
        Hope you never want to take diff backups
packetlost 5mo ago
it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job
- amluto 5mo ago
  Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.
  - dawnerd 5mo ago
    They've raised prices a lot over the last few years while reducing the storage you get.
    - amluto 5mo ago
      The pricing is weird. If you want to buy à la carte storage, it appears to be $40/TB/month for business and $30/TB/month for enterprise: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-more-google-workspace-storage-for-your-organization https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor... This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case. But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility. I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.
  - svara 5mo ago
    The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.
    - bentt 5mo ago
stackghost 5mo ago
>With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Business Strategy 101 teaches that broadly speaking, there are 3 categories into which companies fall, which are cost leadership, differentiation, or segment focus. If, as you say, your only pain point is the cost of dropbox, then any potential alternative would be competing to be the cost leader, and cost leadership strategies are unattractive for startups. Nobody is investing in early-stage companies building "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's hard to attract startup talent to "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's rarely fun for founders to build "a cheaper clone of XYZ". Unfortunately I think there are limited avenues for successful differentiation in the file sync space. Self-hosted vs cloud, standalone vs OS-level integration, cross-platform vs not? Can't think of much else off the top of my head, and I think big players are able to throw shitloads of engineering talent at OS-level integration features (and that gets you iCloud, basically). Beating dropbox at their own game wouldn't be impossible, but I think that's why there aren't many competitors in that space.
- ajkjk 5mo ago
  The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. It'll hurt the growth they have to show investors but not as much as letting you live will.
  - stackghost 5mo ago
    >The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. Yep, this is why cost leadership strategies tend to be unattractive to startups. Finding ways to be meticulously frugal just isn't exciting to most people, I would think.
    - ajkjk 5mo ago
      Well my point is that it's not a question of how exciting it is. It is that it is essentially unworkable as a business strategy, unless you have a technique for being more frugal or efficient than it is possible for your competitor to be. And they have scale on their side, so it is doubtful. (that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)
ajkjk 5mo ago
It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service. (at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)
- layer8 5mo ago
  The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition. While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
  - ajkjk 5mo ago
    For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way. Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)
    - layer8 5mo ago
      Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.
      - 5mo ago
caconym_ 5mo ago
I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions. I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.
- rincebrain 5mo ago
  How have you found syncthing's scaling? I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.
  - caconym_ 5mo ago
    It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.
  - hiq 5mo ago
    On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).
- gonzalohm 5mo ago
  I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)
debo_ 5mo ago
> With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated Good pun!
- browningstreet 5mo ago
  :-)
eikenberry 5mo ago
> Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..] Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.
- browningstreet 5mo ago
  B2 isn't really great as an active file store, it's better as cold storage.
genxy 5mo ago
How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?
jamwt 5mo ago
It's a surprisingly tricky problem. I know all too well. If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.
pianoben 5mo ago
> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above. (I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )
DANmode 5mo ago
Spideroak, pCloud, Resilio Sync. May be worth reviewing.

1970-01-01 5mo ago

You could just put it on a local disk? 512GB sdcard is like $15 at Walmart.

dghlsakjg 5mo ago
Check the price of flash memory again. That $15 card is almost certainly a scam.
- dawnerd 5mo ago
  Yeah their memory of how much memory costs is outdated. I was just at a walmart this weekend and a 128 card was 30 bucks.
- matsemann 5mo ago
  At least if bought from Amazon. It will happily accept writing 512 GB to it, but it's not stored anywhere.
  - irishcoffee 5mo ago
    Yep that burned me once. Lesson learned.
browningstreet 5mo ago
I wanted a forever backup. I'm going to trust Apple and a hard drive.
- lostlogin 5mo ago
  Ah yes, the famously reliable Time Machine.
  - tibbydudeza 5mo ago
    TM was a hack - iCloud is pretty good I reckon - for the millions of devices they have in the market there has been the only odd complaint from somebody on twitter making headlines with a Technorati type of following about user accounts mysterious being deleted or blocked (poor customer support) or some weird syncing issues when moving to a new device and the old device is still in use.
ThePowerOfFuet 5mo ago
Tell me you have no interest in your own data without telling me you have no interest in your own data.
- 1970-01-01 5mo ago
  How is a local copy not the best way to store data?
  - Twirrim 5mo ago
    A local copy is inherently fragile. It's easily destroyed by accident, flood, fire etc. This is especially true when using a single storage device like an SD Card, vs the way that these storage services operate, leveraging things like erasure encoding. Local backups are important, they're cheap, and often fast. They just shouldn't be the only kind of backup you do for data that is important to you.
    - asdff 5mo ago
      Make two local backups and store the other one at work or a friends house.
      - beoberha 5mo ago
        Hope you never want to take diff backups

packetlost 5mo ago

it really is too bad. All of the major tech companies' competitors are junk. Google Drive is the least bad of the bunch (out of, say, OneDrive, iCloud, and formerly Amazon Drive), but it's still not great to deal with. DropBox really does do a great job

amluto 5mo ago
Google Drive has gotten inexplicably cheap for Workspace users, too.
- dawnerd 5mo ago
  They've raised prices a lot over the last few years while reducing the storage you get.
  - amluto 5mo ago
    The pricing is weird. If you want to buy à la carte storage, it appears to be $40/TB/month for business and $30/TB/month for enterprise: https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-more-google-workspace-storage-for-your-organization https://knowledge.workspace.google.com/admin/storage/buy-mor... This is more than S3 charges, but S3 will nickel and dime you aggressively for using that storage depending on your use case. But $22/month buys an entire Google Workspace seat, which includes 5TB, for an effective $5.50/TB/month, which is quite a good deal. On the other hand, it’s rather lacking in flexibility. I find this all somewhat confusing. At least one of these offerings does not reflect the underlying cost of the product.
- svara 5mo ago
  The desktop client used to be just terrible. Has that changed? The Dropbox client does have its issues but it's really amazing at... Syncing files. I use it pretty creatively with large numbers of files and large volumes and it just works reliably.
  - bentt 5mo ago

stackghost 5mo ago

>With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated in the market. I'd only take issue with their price given the volumes of data I'm dealing with. Business Strategy 101 teaches that broadly speaking, there are 3 categories into which companies fall, which are cost leadership, differentiation, or segment focus. If, as you say, your only pain point is the cost of dropbox, then any potential alternative would be competing to be the cost leader, and cost leadership strategies are unattractive for startups. Nobody is investing in early-stage companies building "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's hard to attract startup talent to "a cheaper clone of XYZ". It's rarely fun for founders to build "a cheaper clone of XYZ". Unfortunately I think there are limited avenues for successful differentiation in the file sync space. Self-hosted vs cloud, standalone vs OS-level integration, cross-platform vs not? Can't think of much else off the top of my head, and I think big players are able to throw shitloads of engineering talent at OS-level integration features (and that gets you iCloud, basically). Beating dropbox at their own game wouldn't be impossible, but I think that's why there aren't many competitors in that space.

ajkjk 5mo ago
The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. It'll hurt the growth they have to show investors but not as much as letting you live will.
- stackghost 5mo ago
  >The real issue is that if you do manage to build a cheaper clone they can just delete you by lowering their prices. Yep, this is why cost leadership strategies tend to be unattractive to startups. Finding ways to be meticulously frugal just isn't exciting to most people, I would think.
  - ajkjk 5mo ago
    Well my point is that it's not a question of how exciting it is. It is that it is essentially unworkable as a business strategy, unless you have a technique for being more frugal or efficient than it is possible for your competitor to be. And they have scale on their side, so it is doubtful. (that said I'm just an engineer parroting things I heard while working there, I wasn't involved in any actual strategy)

ajkjk 5mo ago

It's a bad market to take on because the competition is 'commodification by Google/Apple/Microsoft'. If you do a great job you compete with Dropbox on price and quality, and if you do anything short of that you compete with the office suite versions of the same product, which are effectively free to their subscribers (because file sync is packaged with other services that they're buying anyway) so getting people to give you money is very hard. Dropbox itself is perpetually at risk of being commodified out of existence; their constant battle is finding ways to make sure their customers can still justify paying for them as a separate service. (at least this was the ambient understanding internally when I worked there a few years ago)

layer8 5mo ago
The value proposition of Dropbox is exactly that it is an independent service, in my view (in addition to having best-in-class desktop integration). Google/Apple/Microsoft can’t compete with that almost by definition. While not everyone values that, I suspect that enough people do to warrant Dropbox’ existence.
- ajkjk 5mo ago
  For an individual sure, but the vast majority of their business is corporate contracts which don't think that way. Generally it is impossible to understand Dropbox's strategy if you think about individual purchasers as significant. Iirc they mostly serve as a marketing funnel for team- and business-sized contracts. (although this varies from year to year, sometimes they do focus on e.g. family plans for revenue)
  - layer8 5mo ago
    Yeah, I understand that Dropbox isn’t thinking how I think. My argument is that even if they lose these corporate contracts, it should still be a viable (if much smaller) business to serve those users that do care. In other words, it wouldn’t force Dropbox to entirely stop existing.
    - 5mo ago

caconym_ 5mo ago

I think they're squeezed between bigcorps offering consumers products in ecosystems they're already bought into, and independent-minded techies more willing to roll their own solutions. I paid for Dropbox for a long time specifically because it was an independent option, but over time the feature bloat annoyed me more and more, and their dabbling in genai stuff was the last straw. Now I use syncthing over wireguard tunnels.

rincebrain 5mo ago
How have you found syncthing's scaling? I've been trying to use it for a massive tree of ~250k files across ~500k folders, which only needs to live on one device at a time and sync to a backup in case it dies, and even if I tell it send-only/receive-only explicitly, it regularly seems to go cross-eyed at some change made in the folder structure and give up and rescan and hash everything, and if anything in the tree changes while that's happening, it gives up and just marks it a conflict to be manually resolved...or silently hangs until I restart it.
- caconym_ 5mo ago
  It's working well for me (as in totally hands off for months or even years at a time) at (I think, roughly) a few hundred thousand files but probably significantly fewer directories. Overall I'm really impressed and happy with it. But this is just personal file sync, nothing too demanding and unlikely to hit edge cases with concurrent edits etc.
- hiq 5mo ago
  On which operating system? That wouldn't surprise me on Android, a bit more on other platforms (and worth filing an issue).
gonzalohm 5mo ago
I'm surprised by how many people mention Syncthing as an alternative to Dropbox or Google drive. It's not. Syncthing forces you to have a copy of your data on all your devices. With Dropbox or Google drive you can "stream" only the files you need. This is important when you want to share GB of data with devices that can't sync everything into local storage (like a phone)

debo_ 5mo ago

> With their block level syncing, Dropbox is still not really replicated Good pun!

browningstreet 5mo ago
:-)

eikenberry 5mo ago

> Having just rsync'd 100s of GBs back down from B2 and not sure where to put it [..] Why not keep using B2? You didn't mention why you were leaving that platform when it seems like a decent solution to your problem.

browningstreet 5mo ago
B2 isn't really great as an active file store, it's better as cold storage.

genxy 5mo ago

How much are you willing to pay for this service? Ballpark. And what is your ratio of data at rest vs data you want shared? Are you ok with your permanent copy being local?

jamwt 5mo ago

It's a surprisingly tricky problem. I know all too well. If you want to minimize drama, it's worth still paying for Dropbox.

pianoben 5mo ago

> I'm surprised how few competitors there are in the Dropbox space. There used to be many more - Sugarsync, AeroFS, Syncplicity, just to name a few - all bit the dust. Box.com found a niche serving business document flows; Gdrive, iCloud, OneDrive, all survived thanks to being features in a broader Big Tech suite. Everybody else? Outcompeted, plain and simple. Dropbox was just a cut above. (I used to work at one of the companies named above, so although it's just one person's opinion, it's at least as informed as anyone else's here :) )

DANmode 5mo ago

Spideroak, pCloud, Resilio Sync. May be worth reviewing.